Once upon time I purchased a cheap SSL certificate from a company called Regfly. I was starting a small business and wanted a low cost certificate to get started. They were nice. Got the information they needed, issued me the SSL certificate for my web server and made me happy.
Six months on, as it happens for many businesses, my little venture did not take off. So I shutdown everything related to it – including the website. And of course I never renewed this certificate.
That was over 3 years ago.
Couple of months back and over 2 years after the certificate had expired, I got an email similar to this one gently reminding me to renew my SSL certificate.
Since I did not need the certificate, I relied on my email’s trusted DELETE button.
3 days later, the reminder arrived again. One more time I enjoyed usefulness of the DELETE button.
Another 3 days later, the reminder popped up yet again. I got annoyed and decided to get rid of it – confident of easy solution. I thought it will be good idea to let them know that I was not interested in certificate renewal and they should not send me these reminders.
Following usual instinct, I searched for “unsubscribe” or “contact us” link in the email. There was none. I surfed to their website to find any link to unsubscribe or contact them but they wanted me log in first. Having forgotten my password, used the password reminder procedure and logged in. But still there was no option to disable the reminders or unsubscribe from emails.
However I did find a CLOSE my account function. Totally believing that it will also stop all emails from them, I went ahead and CLOSED my account.
But NOT. 3 days later, I got the same hopeless reminder again. Ouch!
With no listed email address or phone number to contact them on their website, I guessed they should have an email alias like support@regfly.com or customerservice@regfly.com. I sent an email to both addresses explaining the situation. The email bounced from the 2nd address but supposedly delivered to first one.
I waited hoping someone will get back to me and take me off these annoying reminders. But NOT.
No one got back to me. The reminders kept coming every 3rd day. I was left with no choice but to use Gmail’s convenient “Report Spam” function. I did that and these reminders started going to Spam folder.
That is the only and less-than-perfect solution techie in me could find to get rid of this unneeded annoyance. Regfly is now among ~5 other companies which annoy me regularly in similar way.
I have no grudge against them but I am posting this to express my frustration over how companies – some providing services for internet itself – do not get their basic internet operations right.
Regfly:
- have no option in their email communication to let me unsubscribe or provide feedback
- have no contact information in emails or on website
- want everyone to log in before one can see “Customer Service” page! But after you login, there still is no easy way to contact them besides submitting a form.
- do not reply emails.
- have programmed this reminder service so badly that it starts reminding you about expired stuff only after couple years of expiration. And the reminders keep coming every 3 days, seemingly forever.
Takeaways from this experience with Regfly:
- Do not do business with any company which does not have their contact information conveniently listed for everyone
- Do not do business with Regfly anymore
- Do not recommend other people to use their services
- Let other people know when a business goes bad (and I think they have in these times of recession)
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Did you try to click the “Renew Cert” link? maybe you can get to them . I always find this way easy to talk to customer service person with sales/promotion etc route.
That is only if you can find a phone number on their website. There is none!
Hi there, sounds like you were lucky to get your SSL at all from these guys! I also get these reminders every three days and also had the added bonus of not being being issued with the cert, despite having paid for it. (I’m not the only – plenty of results on a Google search). Anyway, more of my story here;
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1143421
Basically, do not under any circumstances purchase an SSL or indeed any other service from Regfly as these guys are full on criminal scammers…